GATC Biotech Orders Europe’s First HiSeq 2000 for Commercial Use

Illumina’s latest sequencing system to be installed in the Constance laboratories

Konstanz, January 21, 2010 / b3c newswire / – GATC Biotech today announced the purchase of Illumina’s new HiSeq 2000 sequencing platform, which has officially been launched last week. This latest acquisition will further strengthen GATC Biotech’s current fleet of three GA IIx.

Initially, the company will employ the HiSeq 2000 to human genome sequencing projects from its customers in the pharmaceutical and medical research field. It will also make the system’s high data output available to the industrial and academic research community interested in the high throughput sequencing of larger eukaryotic genomes.

“Illumina’s HiSeq 2000 with the estimated output of 200 GB per run allows us to virtually sequence 60 human genomes at 1x coverage in a week. Being an Illumina CSPro certified service provider we are confident to have the system quickly installed and geared up for production,” says Peter Pohl, CEO of GATC Biotech.

The HiSeq 2000 sequencing system had just been launched by llumina Inc. on the occasion of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference last week in San Diego.

About GATC Biotech – www.gatc-biotech.comGATC Biotech is Europe’s leading service provider of DNA sequencing and bioinformatics for industry and academic research. For two decades the company has been continuously developing new and comprehensive solutions for DNA sequencing and bioinformatics sequence analysis – for individual DNA samples through to whole transcriptome and genome projects. With a total of 13 sequencing instruments (ABI 3730xl, Illumina Genome Analyzer IIx, Roche GS FLX) GATC has the largest commercially available sequencing capacity in Europe with two terabases per year. The company is the first sequencing service provider in Germany to have completed the Illumina CSPro certification process. More than 100 employees serve over 10,000 customers in 40 countries around the globe, and the company has subsidiary companies in Great Britain, France and Sweden.